Jared Olar: How do you say chutzpah’ in Yiddish?

Friday

Mar 16, 2012 at 12:01 AMMar 16, 2012 at 4:16 PM

"Chutzpah (noun): supreme self-confidence; audacity; nerve; gall.” As in: Attempting to deny religious institutions the right to freely exercise their religion, and then when the leaders of said institutions protest, claiming that they are attempting to force everyone to adopt their religion.

Jared Olar

Hold on a sec. I’ve got to look something up.

Flip, flip, flip … Ah, here it is!

“Chutzpah (noun): supreme self-confidence; audacity; nerve; gall.”

As in: Attempting to deny religious institutions the right to freely exercise their religion, and then when the leaders of said institutions protest, claiming that they are attempting to force everyone to adopt their religion.

Or: Trying to force men and women to violate their religious conscience, and then when they refuse to do so, claiming that the conscientious objectors are waging a “war on women.”

Or: Phoning Sandra Fluke to express your solidarity after conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh’s beyond-the-pale and obscene comments about her, after remaining silent when numerous rape and death threats were made against 14-year-old Sarah Crank and her family following her testimony before the Maryland legislature in support of natural marriage.

Well, that’s not necessarily chutzpah. Moral inconsistency and incoherence, a double standard, and political cynicism, yes, but perhaps not chutzpah.

But it does take a lot of chutzpah for the National Organization for Women, which not only did not protest Bill Clinton’s misconduct but defended him, to call on Clear Channel to drop Limbaugh’s show over his slurs. And it’s definitely chutzpah — and an unjustifiable double standard — to express loud outrage over Limbaugh’s ill-conceived and over-the-line commentary after failing to call for the firing and ostracism of Marc Maron, Matt Taibbi, Keith Olbermann, John Sylvester, Ed Schultz or Bill Maher, who have attacked women (especially conservative women) using language just as bad as and far worse than Limbaugh’s.

It would be easier to believe the outrage isn’t primarily motivated by politics if it weren’t selective outrage.

More serious a problem than the chutzpah and the double standard, however, is the skewed, disordered priorities.

Really, most of the same people infuriated by what Limbaugh said are just fine with the executive branch brazenly trampling on the First Amendment.

Frankly, I can’t get worked up about the Fluke-Limbaugh flap. There are far more egregious violations and offenses confronting us.

But then the Fluke-Limbaugh flap has served as a convenient distraction for the proponents of the federal government’s abortifacient-contraception-sterilization insurance mandate. And no wonder, because the more people learn about the mandate’s callous and entirely unnecessary coercion of the individual’s moral conscience, the more people disapprove.

A New York Times poll this month found that 51 percent think employers should be allowed to opt out of contraception insurance coverage for moral or religious reasons, while 57 percent think religious employers should be allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights. And that was a poll that only asked about contraception coverage. Other polls have informed participants that President Barack Obama’s mandate also includes sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, and those poll results show even greater opposition to the mandate.

Granted, these percentages are still far lower than the statistic of 98 percent of Catholic women who purportedly use contraception (including elderly women, nuns and pregnant women?), but I thought it best to rely on authentic poll results rather than a bogus statistic that the Washington Post’s fact-checkers have awarded two Pinocchios.

As for the so-called Republican war on women, that of course is merely typical extremist partisan rhetoric, a deliberate falsehood even more fictitious than the “98 percent of Catholic women.” The GOP’s opposition to the mandate is supposed to offend women (who, as everyone knows, all think exactly alike about every issue), but Obama’s latest approval ratings (which are the lowest they’ve ever been) show that his support among women has plummeted just as severely as his support among men.

So much for the left’s imaginary “GOP war on women.” Anybody know how you say “Back to the drawing board” in Yiddish?